Speaking as a partisan right wing-nut, and a 4th generation Republican at that, the Republican presidents with which I am familiar — would have bombed the hell out of every ISIS-known stronghold by now.

President Obama spoke yesterday from the Edgartown School in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Among other things he said:

So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings.

But they call themselves The Islamic State, they claim to be establishing “a new Islamic Caliphate” and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has proclaimed himself the Caliph. A few days ago, it was claimed that ISIS, which arose out of the defeated Sunni ‘militants’ of al Qaeda in Iraq fighters, had been banished by al Qaeda in February, but apparently, since ISIS has been pretty successful in getting financing (robbing banks and ransom money for hostages), and acquiring a vast store of American weapons, al Qaeda is claiming them again.

We have seen videos of all sorts of jihadists, including little children, who proclaim that God requires them to do jihad until all the unbelievers are gone. Early in Dexter Filkins essential book The Forever War, he spoke of talking to some Pakistani prisoners in Lejdeh in Northern Afghanistan.

Then there was Faiz Ahmad, seventeen, wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, a hajj cap and no beard. He seemed listless like the others, but when I asked him a question, he came alive.
“It is written in the Koran that we must kill the nonbelievers,” Ahmad said. “My teacher taught me this.” … “There is no end to the jihad,” Ahmad said.”It will go on forever until doomsday.”

I understand the politically correct need to proclaim that Islam is a Religion of Peace, and there are an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, just under the numbers of Christians, and most are not jihadists. But how are the 1.6 billion going to stamp out the very noisy jihadists who want to destroy us all, if we keep saying ‘never mind, it’s really a religion of peace? “Sayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual forefathers of jihadist thought, believed that Islam could not truly be practiced without a caliphate unifying the Muslim world and implementing Islamic law.”

President Obama, in his statement, added that “we do what’s necessary to see that justice is done.” Attorney General Eric Holder said today that his Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation into the brutal execution by Islamic State militants of American journalist James Foley, in the latest move by the administration to use the criminal justice system to pursue terrorists.

I assumed it was a military matter, but political correctness trumps all. “Speaking truth to power,” as the saying goes — doesn’t have much truth in it. And considering consequences is seldom involved. The Islamic State may be rich in cash and weapons, and according to Al Jazeera has jihadis flocking to their cause, but al Qaeda has the linked organizations all over the world. Killing bin Laden did not make the threat go away, To the contrary, we now have jihadists with American and European passports.

Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was killed in early 2002, was killed for the same reason that an ISIS fanatic killed James Foley — to convey an impression of strength— an admission of weakness instead. Max Boot has outlined the necessity for a military intervention and its essential nature.

Janet Daley, writing in The Telegraphsums it up with clarity in a column that asks “What does the Obama White House stand for?”

Barack Obama is discovering – rather belatedly – precisely what is involved in being president of the United States. How he has managed to avoid this for his first term and a half in office is a historical peculiarity. But we are where we are. He now has a full-blown, world-threatening foreign crisis in which the decisions that he makes from one minute to the next might result in immediate mass slaughter, a prolonged war or a gradual de-escalation of the conflict – or possibly all three in progressive stages. At the same moment, bizarrely, he is facing a domestic upheaval of staggering proportions: the return of riots and racially based violence in the urban streets of a kind which his very election as president was supposed to have made a thing of the past.